


alkaline solution

by enmity



Category: Persona 2, Persona Series
Genre: F/F, Gen, Innocent Sin, idek man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 15:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13057152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: Joker, she thinks. What a foolish urban legend.





	alkaline solution

**Author's Note:**

> edit: blacked out and for some reason this gained like 600 more words. LMFAO

Anna spends one Thursday afternoon sitting with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up on the red landing mat, staring at the half-glow of cigarette after cigarette against the empty ceiling for lack of anything better. It’s dark in the supply room—the bulb blew out ages ago and no one cared to replace it—but the sky is only a little less dim outside of it, clouds grey and pouring what seems to be a decade’s worth of rain, harsh and cold in equal parts.  

A teacher had given her one of the spare keys back when she still had a title to her name, when she was the kind of student adults could trust without a second thought, and though now she isn’t either of those things, isn’t anything much at all, he hadn’t remembered to ask for it back, and so she kept it with her: a rotten, mundane reminder of the life she used to lead and the future she thought was hers to have. Just cool metal rusting at the edges, under the fold of her skirt pocket. And now here she is, taking advantage of a now-undeserved privilege.

She doesn’t have an umbrella, but that way the rain will wash away the smell of ash from her clothes, and so her parents will think she’s gone to class, and they won’t have to waste time asking questions out of transparently fake concern that she won’t bother answering, anyway, so it all works out. Most of the other students have long gone out, and the weather’s too bad to go outside, and anyway, even if she doesn’t come back, no one’s stupid enough to go looking for someone like her. She hasn’t gone to school in a long time. She doubts anyone remembers her name anymore.

It’s a comforting thought, almost, and so Anna brings her legs closer to her chest, decides she’ll stay here for a while longer. No one rues the day a distant star decides to die. The ember glowing weakly at the end of the cancer stick between her teeth burns brighter when she inhales, a little too harshly, and for a good few seconds she’s too distracted with curbing the urge to cough or splutter reflexively like an idiot to remember that she still hates the way it feels when the smoke gets into her lungs, all toxins, or that she wants to die, anyway, that everyone dies eventually, so there’s no point in caring, no point in trying or anything at all—

“ _Onee-sama_!”

The door slides open, a harsh swing of hinges and a heavy knock of wood against the frame, and Anna looks up, perplexingly jarred and unsurprised at once by the younger girl’s presence. Looking at Noriko, hair soaked wet to the tips of the ribbons dangling at her back, her eyes wide and bright with relief shining against the gloom, Anna has to bite back the urge to laugh: of course.

Because if there’s anyone stupid enough not to have given up on her for good by now, it has to be Noriko.

“I saw you at the gates this morning, but you didn’t come to your afternoon classes. I didn’t you see leave when school ended, either, and I thought maybe something had happened and I,” she looks dangerously close to sobbing, “I was really worried. Don’t ever pull that disappearing act on me again! You idiot!”

For a moment Anna tenses, some part of her readying for a hit or an outburst, but instead Noriko only nears, joining Anna to sit on the mat. She must’ve smelled the smoke because the next second she’s edging away, just an inch, hiding the start of a sniffle or a frown with the back of her hand. The sole of Noriko’s shoe drags an absent track of mud across the floor as she turns aside.

“You’re killing yourself like this,” Noriko says, interrupting a minute of stretched silence. “Don’t you care at all about yourself? It’s not like—it’s not the end, you know. Just because you can’t run anymore… it doesn’t mean you…”

She trails away, looks at her hands; avoids Anna’s gaze all the while, her eyes full of resignation or perhaps something less noble, an emotion less reflective of the martyr role she’s so convinced Anna wants her to become. But what would she know. Anna doesn’t care enough to speculate either possibility.

(Figures: Noriko’s only ever loved the parts of her she imagined, or so Anna would think, if she thought so highly of herself as someone anyone could stand to love. Even Noriko, she knows, would regret it, eventually. It will come sooner rather than later. It will.)

“Don’t you care about me at all?”

She doesn’t answer, but Noriko doesn’t leave her side, despite everything, looking content to sit in the dark shivering with her arms drawn protectively to her chest, and she supposes she’s always known this, but it hits Anna acutely then that between the two of them, she’s the weaker-minded fool: because she doesn’t push Noriko off then, doesn’t spit out a rejection or something worse, doesn’t tell the other girl she doesn’t care about her, or at least not anymore—because now that everything else precious has been taken away from her there’s no point in hoarding any more; what’s the point in holding something close knowing fate will only rob it from you eventually?—because she knows whatever cruelty she might have to offer to chase Noriko away will not be the truth, not completely, and it’s that part of her that still thinks of Noriko as someone deserving of her honesty, her kindness, the exception to the rest, that proves how weak she really is, truly, really.

She wonders, for a moment, if Noriko knows.

The rain stops half an hour later. In the end Anna walks home with Noriko at her side, if only to make the other girl feel better, only for a little while more. If only for that.

—

 _Joker_ , she thinks, not for the first time. The name resurfaces in her mind every other night in the same worn, too-familiar way that pain jolts up her bad leg when she turns too suddenly under the blanket to sink into sleep that never comes. Her parents’ voices in the kitchen are muffled and distant through the door and the flimsy cover of her sheets but their words haven’t yet been smothered, not completely, not yet, growing ever louder in the still darkness surrounding her like freezing water, merciless and submerging at all sides. She stopped holding her breath long ago and she hasn’t yet drowned.

 _Because it’s all imaginary._ In her head: that was what they’d said, her mother and her teacher and the doctor looking at her with calm eyes behind the light bouncing off his glasses. _You should start, Anna, with looking to fix what you still can._ _It’s not the end,_ he’d said, as though he were the divine being fit to decide true from false, as though it were his throne that had crumbled and his bones that had shattered _. It’s not the end_ , he'd said, and Noriko had said so too.

Someone chimes, voice ringing out hollow amidst all the noise— _they say he grants people’s dreams!—_ bright-eyed with the detached curiosity of a passerby. _Maybe he’ll even grant yours!_

“Joker,” she says, startlingly, hating the fragility of her own voice. The syllables muted into her pillow, like the groveling plea of a hurt, caged thing. Joker—

Anna shuts her eyes. What a foolish urban legend.

—

A boy corners her outside of Zodiac two days later. Anna narrows her eyes on instinct, the line of her shoulders pulling taut, her casted shadow against the club’s wall lengthening and wavering with the flickering glow of the neon sign hung above the building entrance. The first thing she notices is his Kasugayama uniform—another one of those delinquents? But, no, he doesn’t have the looks for it. He has the sort of pretty-boy face that people would no doubt line up for a chance to devour, to sully for no other reason than to prove they could, but at the same time he doesn’t, not really, like it’s all just an act he’s putting forth with nary an effort. She can’t tell. It seems like something Noriko would envy. It’s hard to immediately read his expression, to pinpoint what he wants and wants from her specifically, so for a second she just stands, silent, observing, waiting for him to make his move so she can act accordingly. Above them, the sky’s gone almost completely dark.

He’s older, she ascertains this without knowing how, and he looks at her in a way that males usually don’t, but all the same he looks at her like he thinks what he has to say to her is something worth listening to—the way all men do deep down—and that’s reason enough for her to decide that she doesn’t like this boy.

“You must be Anna Yoshizaka-san,” he says, watching the way she stills at her full name, outstretching his hand in an offering of civility at the same time his mouth curls into a smile, small and cordial and far too deep than she, a virtual stranger, has any reason to warrant. It’s unsettling. She hates unearned familiarity. When she doesn’t accept his hand immediately he adds, nearing and unperturbed: “I’ve heard about you, you know. Though I’m sure that’s not surprising.”

 _I don’t know you_ , she thinks to say, looking away despite herself, a sense of dread running sudden and brisk up her spine, or _fuck off_ , _creep,_ and for a moment she considers punching him and leaving him there, just to get it over with—

And then.

“You had a dream, once, didn’t you? No—you still do. I would know. You called me, after all.”

She stands, frozen, letting him talk on. His voice is calm.

And then:

“Tell me. Would you like to change the world?”

“No,” Anna replies. Decisive and instantaneous. But still she turns to face him, giving him her full attention; returning his false smile with one of her own, sharp yet genuine, shimmering against the bright neon like a shard of broken glass: a sign that she’s willing to listen.  

Maybe with this, a part of her thinks, Noriko will leave her for good. So be it. So be it. She doesn’t care.

 _Better sooner rather than later, after all_ , she thinks (and feels her mirthless smile broadening by a degree.)

—

She says yes.

—

A week later, she stops coming to school altogether. Her parents, barely on speaking terms with her anymore, have given up trying to rein her in; she decides to be grateful for it, rather than anything else. Noriko tries to visit, once, twice, thrice, the doorbell ringing at the same time for days with what seems like increasing amounts of fervent, misguided desperation—until her attempts grow more irregular, and stop altogether. It’s fine, Anna thinks. She refuses to feel sorry. It’s for the best. Better sooner Noriko realizes the kind of person she is, has been all along, than later.

She buys cigarettes on the way to visit him for the first time. Joker eyes the pack she pulls out nonchalantly with a distasteful look, expression creasing minutely, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t pretend he thinks she’s suddenly worthy of his attention the moment she commits a perceived transgression, or that she cares whether or not she is. When he eventually looks away, a glimpse of something between intrigue and disgust flashing by his face, she can’t help but feel like laughing at him, and though she doesn’t, the urge never does go away, and neither does the contempt: something smoldering and constant beneath her chest, her eyelashes when she turns her gaze to meet his in a rare moment of acknowledgment, even as past experience tells her she should be more alarmed in his presence, that she should regard her superior with at least _some_ sense of reverence.

She ignores it, of course, and days later, when all of this fails to deter his grand delusions of _understanding_ her, Anna decides she might hate him a little bit less.  

—

Anna pulls on the coat, the mask, and then, as she wraps the scarf around her neck, for the first time in weeks she has to try very hard not to be reminded of the color of the ribbon tied around Noriko’s hair.

“See?” Joker’s eyes meet hers in the mirror, no less gleefully vindictive than the smile he had offered her only moments ago, when he’d folded his arms and told her sagely from the vantage afforded atop his throne— “I was right! Blue suits you perfectly.”

She grits her teeth, grips the handle of her whip a little more tightly, and to her credit her expression doesn’t change; not even when he turns his back to her distractedly, walking away.

**Author's Note:**

> as usual i've mildly diverged from canon bc i can't keep my facts straight. hopefully that wasn't bad enough to detract. idek man. anna's pov is so hard i'm not sure i got this/my interpretations right
> 
> written for persona week day #2-persona 2


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